4 Cloud-Based Project Management Tools to Manage Your Work Better

Effective project management is essential for the success of any business. You need a proper strategy in place to execute and materialize your ideas, visions and goals. You need to define your goals and draw a detailed plan to achieve them. In its core, project management helps you do exactly the same.

While it is no-brainer that project management plays a key role in the success of a business, many organizations are still depending on single user desktop tools.

Worse still, there are businesses using paper, sticky notes and white boards to manage their projects. This happened mostly because many businesses, especially small and mid-sized organizations shy away from onsite implementation of project management tools as they are expensive and require constant support and maintenance. But things started changing as cloud-based project management tools entered the market.

Cost effectiveness is the prime reason why more and more businesses are now opting for cloud-based project management solutions. Besides, it offers instant availability, allowing businesses to centralize their projects for faster delivery and better performance.

If you too are looking for an agile cloud-based project management solution for your business, here we have hand-picked some of the most effective online tools.

1. Nutcache

A cloud-based collaborative project management tool, Nutcache is fast becoming popular in the business world. This project management tool comes with integrated expense management, invoicing and time-tracking features. In fact, the company has recently updated their time tracking feature, which now allows multiple web timers, track time by start/end of a task, improved display grid and instant overview of the project time report.

But what makes Nutcache special and appealing for businesses, both large and small, is that it allows you to streamline your business process. If you are looking for a project management tool that will help you better plan and organize the work while tracking the work of your team members, Nutcache is the ideal solution.

Using this tool, you can effectively develop client-based projects, assign tasks to team members and overview the progress of each task, manage your deadlines, keep control of your resources and budget, determine project’s expense to prepare accurate estimation and compare project performance. Better yet, Nutcache allows teams allocate tasks based on their preferred management methods.

You can use Nutcache for free to work smarter. In addition, it offers a PRO version, starting from $14/month and an Enterprise version that costs $250/month. It also allows 30-day free trial for both the paid packages.

2. ActiveCollab

ActiveCollab is a simple, yet powerful project management solution. Install this tool for its simplicity and ease of use. In fact, it is so simple that you don’t even have to stress yourself to provide training to your team for using this project management tool.

With a myriad of add-ons, this flexible tool enables you to stay organized. ActiveCollab offers features like document management, priority and task control, time tracking, invoicing and budgeting features and email-based communication. While this tool is intuitive and provides outstanding support, they still need to work on the task views. ActiveCollab still use the timeline and column views to provide a task overview rather than using Gantt or Kanban boards.

This tool runs in the cloud; however, you can also install ActiveCollab on your own server. For self-hosting, you need to pay a onetime fee of $499. Besides, there are monthly plans starting from $25/month. ActiveCollab also has 30-day free trial offer.

3. Pivotal Tracker

Pivotal Tracker, designed by Pivotal Labs, is especially aimed for Web and mobile developers. This is a great solution for teams handling multiple Web/app development projects. Pivotal Tracker comes with features like constructive communication via messaging between users, burn down charts, user stories and project-based tasks. It is extremely easy to use this tool that seamlessly reflects the status of a project.

This tool also comes with a set of feedback tools, making communication and QA a smooth process. Pivotal Tracker also comes with an iOS app and supports cross-functional teams. It is, in fact, a fantastic project management solution for agile software development. Better yet, Pivotal Tracker allows various integrations such as Zendesk, JIRA, and Bugzilla etc.

Pivotal Tracker offers a free version limited to 3 users. It is also free for non-profits, public projects and academic institutions, although support is typically slow for non-paying users. There are two paid packages – Pro and Enterprise. Pricing for the Pro plan ranges between $75 and $300 per month, depending on the number of collaborators. Pivotal Tracker’s Pro plan is limited to 50 collaborators; it offers an Enterprise plan if you have more than 50 collaborators. You can even install this tool on your own private cloud.

4. Projecturf

Projecturf is a cloud-based project management tool that enables you to manage your projects, tasks and people seamlessly. Be it a big or small project, you need to collaborate with your team members and clients, assign and manage tasks, share files and more for a successful completion. Projecturf helps you to do that and more.

Once you sign in to this project management tool, you can create different projects and add team members to allow them instant access. In addition, you can create and manage tasks, have real-time discussions, track progress, create events on the calendar and upload and share documents within a project. You can even analyze project data with Projecturf, thanks to its dashboard activity history and reporting features. And its email-like conversation makes you feel completely at home.

The pricing chart of Projecturf is as interesting as its features; it offers unlimited users and unlimited storage. You can pay based on your project amount per month, ranging from $20/month to $100/month. In addition, there is an Enterprise solution that comes with free demo and trial account.

Conclusion

Cloud-based project management tools not only makes work easier and more organized, they also help you do things in the best possible way. Best yet, they are affordable and easy to maintain as there is no on-site deployment. If you are looking for some robust and cost-effective solutions for your project management needs, you can invest in some of these tools mentioned here to improve your teams’ assessment, reporting and communication abilities.

Pratik Dholakiya is the Founder of The 20 Media, a content marketing agency specializing in content & data-driven SEO, and advisor at MoveoApps, a mobile apps development company. He regularly speaks at various conferences about SEO, Content Marketing, Entrepreneurship, and Digital PR. Pratik has spoken at NextBigWhat’s UnPluggd, IIT-Bombay, SMX Israel, CMO Asia, SEMrush Meetup, MICA, IIT-Roorkee and other major events across Asia.

5 Reactions

Thanks for sharing. I’ve used few of the recommended project management web application and found them to be quite useful. At this time I think they are mostly helpful for small to medium size organizations given they’re much cheaper to maintain and can productively provide all that is required without having to pay large sums of money for limited services. Larger organizations are always burdened with software without using much of core functionalities. With all these services being provided through cloud applications, it won’t be long before their use becomes much more common. For project management, it remains with the user – by that I mean having some form of project governance structure within organizations that requires project managers to adopt some form of standardized methods, procedures, and tools and techniques to implement and manage projects.

I liked the cloud because it granted me access to my files no matter where I am. With it, I don’t have to panic if I suddenly change computers. I can simply redownload all of my files there. It’s that simple.

I like the fact that focused on new up and coming apps, not only on the big old dinosaurs like Basecamp, Asana, Harvest etc. It’s interesting to see how agile has now become the norm, everyone is focused on using agile, even if their work wouldn’t need that kind of project management. I guess people like how it sounds.

When I first looked for project management apps I tested a bunch of them and finally stuck with Paymo

It’s not agile, although I think they want to go that way as well, but it’s a pretty complete app project management and time tracking wise.

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